What if Trump Wins a Second Term?

I try hard to value others’ opinions, especially when they are informed. That’s tougher in the digital age, because we are increasingly entrenched in information silos which don’t always provide us unfiltered truths. Still, I’ve tried to moderate my publicly stated positions on President Trump because I’d rather inform than alienate. At this point though, I feel silence is complicity.

A great article in the Atlantic explains some of the potential dangers of a second Trump presidency. The Pulitzer Prize winning author, Paul Starr, writes that,

“the biggest difference between electing Trump in 2016 and re-electing Trump in 2020 would be irreversibility.”

He points to the areas of “climate change, the risk of a renewed global arms race, and control of the Supreme Court ”to make his case. The first two he writes, “will become much harder to address as time goes on.” The third one, “stands to remake our constitutional democracy and undermine capacity for future change.”

One specific example Starr points to, is Trump’s work to hinder the reduction of CO2 emissions. “According to the Global Carbon Project, a worldwide decarbonization effort begun now, would require a 5% per year emissions reduction to keep us below 2 degrees Celsius of warming. If put off another decade, it will take 9%. “In the United States” Starr writes,

“the economic disruption and popular resistance sure to arise from such an abrupt transition may be more than our political system can bear.”

Starr also warns that a Trump re-election will likely result in a “stepped-up” arms race, with countries in the Middle East and Asia pursuing nuclear weapons because they no longer believe they can rely on “American security guarantees”. These aren’t the only regions of concern. When Trump suspended U.S. participation in the INF treat, Putin did the same and promised a “symmetrical response” to new American weapons. In his State of the Union address shortly after, Trump threatened to “outspend and out-innovate all others by far” in weapons development.

A two-term Trump may also, writes Starr, have the opportunity to appoint four Supreme Court justices. Nixon was the last president to have this opportunity, and not since FDR has there been such an opportunity for a president to shift the Court’s ideological balance. At risk are not only “Roe v. Wade, and other decisions expanding rights protecting free speech, and mandating separation of church and state”, but also worker protections such as minimum wage provided by the federal government’s authorization to regulate labor and the economy. All a fully conservative Court need do, is reverse the previous decision from 1937 regarding the Constitution’s commerce clause, to “sharply limit the government’s regulatory powers”. The first casualty of that change might very well be the Affordable Care Act, which was saved in 2012 only by Justice Roberts holding it was a constitutional exercise of taxing power by the government due to the commerce clause.

Starr concludes,

“with a second term, Trump’s presidency would go from an aberration to a turning point in American history”.

Both “the effects of climate change and the risks associated with another nuclear arms race are bound to be convulsive”. And, the country would be dealing with these global threats in an increasingly hostile environment of “deeply alienated from friends abroad and deeply divided at home”. The Supreme Court would also likely be far out of line with public opinion, thereby positioning itself at the center of political conflict.

The key it appears, is for Americans to wake up from the matrix in which they’ve been living, and fully understand the stakes of the 2020 election. Whether we will do that, remains to be seen. As Starr writes, “the master of distraction will be back at it next year” and concludes with

“if we cannot focus on what matters, we may sleepwalk into a truly perilous future.”

I just hope and pray that enough of us wake up before Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell walk our country off the proverbial cliff.